Why Now Is the Time to Take Down the Confederate Flag

...and the governor officially agrees.

On Saturday morning, Dylann Roof's alleged manifesto made the digital rounds, adding another terrible dimension to the 21-year-old behind a mass shooting that left nine African American dead at a Charleston church.

The manifesto, posted on the website "Last Rhodesian," made numerous racist, heinous claims that do not deserve reprinting. The substance of the manifesto upholds the statement Roof made after his arrest: He wanted to start a "race war." Along with the words, a zip file was found, containing numerous photographs of Roof. He is shown stomping and burning the American flag and waving the Confederate flag—an emblem that still flies over the South Carolina Statehouse.

The Confederate flag represents the darkest time in American history, yet it is oft upheld as a historic relic of the nation, in a way similar to Betsy Ross's 13-star flag. The Confederate flag has been reprinted on license plates (one of which Roof owned,) on hats, on t-shirts—on just about anything money could buy. There is a disconnect between the reality of what the Confederate flag represented (preserving slavery), and how a portion of the public perceives the flag (charming antiquity).

When the Confederate States of America was formed by seceding from the Union in 1861, the new government thought it appropriate to create their own flag. The Confederacy went through numerous versions before they landed on the Rebel Flag we think of today, which bears the blue and white 'X' shape. The flag was most readily used by Confederate soldiers, who flew it as they went into war against their Northern brothers, killing one another in an effort to preserve slavery in the South.

The Confederate flag was so synonymous with the battle over slavery that Union soldiers would capture it from the fights they won. By the end of the Civil War, the U.S. War Department in Washington, D.C. had amassed 545 Confederate flags. Many of these flags were inscribed with the date and description of the battle they belonged to. The Union soldiers who captured the flags were awarded Congressional Medals of Honor.

In the early 1900's, Congress allowed these captured Confederate flags to be returned to the Southern states from which they came. The Museum of the Confederacy received the vast majority of these flags. In the photographs posted to his alleged site, Dylann Roof stands outside of the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville, South Carolina. Confederate flags of various styles flap in the wind behind him.

Though Roof obviously visited the museum for his personal satisfaction rather than its historical value, museums are exactly where such flags belong. That way, they can be shunned behind the walls of an establishment dedicated to America's two most notable failures: slavery and the South's attempt to preserve it for economic gain.

While flags around the nation were lowered to half staff in honor of those killed by Roof, the Confederate flag outside the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina stayed at full mast. The flag, quite literally, cannot be lowered—it is not on a pulley system. It can only be removed or remain atop the pole.

Technically, the flag is not on the Statehouse—it is on the Confederate Soldier Monument outside of the Statehouse...which is outside the Statehouse. This move from the capitol dome to the monument was an attempt at compromise in 2000, as many wanted to remove it altogether and others argued for it to say in the name of history integrity (South Carolina has flown the Confederate flag for decades.)

Leaving both sides unhappy, the flag stayed on Statehouse grounds, just not on the dome. To remove it, at least two thirds of the General Assembly must agree in a vote. Getting two thirds of any room full of politicians is an extremely rare, if not virtually impossible, feat.

Governor Nikki Haley, who doesn't have the authority to take down the flag, once boasted that it was not bad for business. "I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag," Haley said in 2014.

To Haley's point, the flag may not be bad for the economy. Indeed, plantation owners once argued slavery was wonderful for the economy. Neither is a good argument in the face of moral atrocity. (Haley has since called for the removal of the flag from the State Capitol grounds, though two-thirds of both houses must vote in order to change the law and actually make it happen.)

The Confederate Flag was born out of soldiers attempting to kill to preserve the ownership of human beings. It is not merely an antiquity, it is and always has been the representation of shame—the shame of slavery, the shame of attempting to preserve it and now, the shame that over 150 years later, an American state can still produce a young man who upholds the values of a flag that needed to be buried decades ago.